On the occasion of theCaravaggio e i Giustiniani exhibition (in Rome, at Palazzo Giustiniani, 26 January - 15 May 2001), by courtesy of the Electa publishing house we reproduce from the catalogue part of the essay by Silvia Danesi Squarzina on the Giustianini collection.

A sense of vanity regarding earthly things and the contradictory desire to perpetuate the memory of itself by means of a collection which is inimitable and innovative compared with current taste, a monument and summing-up of the first forty years of 17th century culture; an arc of time that has as its background the union of politics and religion and, in the foreground, an idea of reality as revelation, as a flash of light, a going beyond the formal conventions, to astonish and transgress, through the dazzling ascent of everyday language (hoggidism, a term introduced by the scholars of baroque literature) as embodied by Caravaggio, to which followed the European phenomenon of Caravaggism and its slow eclipse. Certainly we cannot comprehend and appreciate the centrality of Caravaggio's language if we do not realise, particularly in the century we are dealing with, how the task of global communication was entrusted to painting.
A characteristic of this great commission is the fact of being immersed in the active and binding financial life of its particular time.
The term Baroque, commonly used in order to define painting and sculpture in the Italian 16th century, is inadequate in defining the taste of the merchant class for collecting in that age, a class which was modified compared with its great 14th century predecessors but which conserved in its genetic patrimony the chromosome of adherence to facts, to reality.
Dominators of financial markets thanks to the modernity of the instruments used (bills of exchange, banks, etc.) the Genoan merchants controlled the key positions in the European economy through loans to popes and sovereigns. They were buoys, cardinal points around which rotated the games of power and the changes in politico-cultural fortunes.
To what must we attribute the interest, no longer only specialised, but by now widened to a vast public, towards great collecting? This is a subject for study in which it is possible to see impressed in the work of art also the man to whom it was destined, as a co-creator together with the artist himself. For some time now research into the history of art has opened up new curiosity concerning the preferences of the patrons and towards the collections as a whole. "Collecting" is conceived as a fulfilled work of art in itself, needing to be safeguarded in its integrity, a reflection of its time, an instrument of conscience. The importance of conserving picture galleries, each intended as a whole, was much felt by the collectors themselves who, in order to prevent their heirs either selling or splitting them up, used an important juridical instrument, that of the trust. This tie has preserved great Roman collections such as the Borghese, the Spada, the Doria Pamphilj and so on. Unfortunately it has not saved that of the Giustinianis, which was among the most beautiful, and the economic difficulties of the heirs have decreed its progressive dispersal which began halfway through the 18th century and came to a conclusion in the 19th.
The Giustinani family was Genoan and gave doges to the Superba. A branch of the family had created an immense fortune by trading in mastic and alum on the island of Scio, in the Aegean sea, with a global vision of the markets and the economy through an associative structure called "maona", a forerunner of modern joint stock companies. All its members took the name Giustiniani. In 1566, Giuseppe Giustiniani left the Greek island of Scio chased out by the growing intrusion of the Turks who, due to a production crisis, had not been paid the customary tribute, and moved to Rome. There, the brother of his wife Gerolama, Cardinal Vincenzo Giustiniani (7 August 1519 - 2 October 1582), general of the Dominican foundation of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, enjoyed great prestige and power and guaranteed support inside the Curia. Giuseppe brought with him his children and great sums in cash judging from the possessions and offices which he quickly purchased. The alliances of his brother-in-law, the far-sighted Dominican cardinal, from Filippo Neri to Carlo Borromeo, both destined to be made saints, oriented those of Giuseppe and his descendants, including matrimonial choices, human and social relationships contracted between the oratory of the Filippines and pauperist religious orders. Alliances with banking circles are also noted. All this in the framework of great administrative and financial ability, typical of the Genoan and peculiar to the Giustiniani family, who loaned money to half Europe, sometimes to both the contenders in conflicts taking place.
The cash that the noble merchant used immediately assured him an important position in the equilibri of Roman society, characterised by an agrarian aristocracy short of liquidity. He became responsible for the Depositeria Pontificia. For his two sons, Benedetto (Scio,
5 June 1554 - Rome, 27 March 1621) and Vincenzo (Scio, 13 September 1564 - Rome, 27 December 1637), he was to procure a role of importance. Relevant characteristics of their lives were the great reserve, parsimony, lack of ostentation of their riches and power, as well as their innovative artistic choices towards the developing realism in the style of Caravaggio. It is fitting to fix the date of the death of the father of the two collectors Benedetto and Vincenzo in 1600 as being the start of our treatment of the subject, even if some paintings can already be referred to his purchases, begun with Venetian painting, that of Ferrara and obviously that of Genoa. The initials GG impressed in the wax seal on the back of some works among which the Nativitą on a panel by Palma il Vecchio - inv. 1621, 216, which reappears in inv. 1638, II, 17 attributed to the "early manner of Titian", Berlin, Gemäldegalerie - and the Garofalo di Colonia (see diagram) are perhaps the initials of Giuseppe Giustiniani. Bernardo Castello, the Genoan painter, a great friend of the poet Giovanni Battista Marino, and painter of the frescoes in the room of Psyche (1605) in Palazzo Giustiniani at Bassano Romano (formerly Bassano di Sutri) had painted a Nativitą dated 1582 (inv. 1600, 85) for Giuseppe, today in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, which in fact became part of Benedetto's collection after the death of his father Giuseppe. This same artist was commissioned, after October 1582, the date of the death of Cardinal Vincenzo Giustiniani, to make the altar-piece for the family chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva featuring the Predica di San Vincenzo Ferreri, dated 1584. Both these works contain the face of Giuseppe who commissioned them. The altar-piece of the Minerva shows us the youthful Benedetto wearing canonicals and also the face of Vincenzo as a young boy.
Until 1621, the date of the death of the first-born, the Giustiniani collection grew due to a perfect understanding between the two brothers, Cardinal Benedetto and the Marquis Vincenzo. The former had the task of linking the fortunes of the family to success with the pontifical curia, while the latter that of assisting this rise in importance with careful purchases of art, long-lasting, and the fruit of an infallible aesthetic sense, as well as with hard work in handling the finances of the family's growing riches. Since the subject of the current exhibition are the paintings, we can therefore only merely mention the palace building and the antique sculptures, which would be important subjects for another order of research.
We do not know when Vincenzo began to accumulate the statues which in the inventory of 1638 we see situated in the gallery and in the rooms of the palace in San Luigi dei Francesi as well as in other residences. The inventory on the death of Cardinal Benedetto lists the contents of the gallery in 1621, and in it we find 39 paintings - among which Cambiaso, Dosso, Francia, Giorgione (?), Veronese, Titian, an interesting copy of a work by Bramantino, Calvaert, Baglione, Caravaggio, Passignano and Pomarancio - and very few statues. This has raised the question to which archaeologists have not provided an answer as to the whereabouts at that date of the statues owned by Vincenzo? Perhaps the collection had not yet reached the huge number of items that we gather it contained seventeen years later and probably many antique pieces were in the villa at Laterano, owned by the Marquis (while the villa at the Muro Torto belonged to Benedetto).
The statues seem to have had various changes of location, not only a long time after 1638, but already after 1621, when Vincenzo inherited the whole palace.
For some time the attention of scholars of the 17th century and antiquity has been directed to the gallery of Palazzo Giustiniani. Understanding its fruition is fundamental given the role model that it represented for its time.
So far the part played by the decoration of the walls is not clear: a sort of tapestry on which to hang paintings or rather a heritage of the first proprietors of the building, whitewashed, according to Lucia Guerrini, by Vincenzo himself. It has also been suggested that some sculptures were placed on shelves attached to the walls on which are frescoed great twisted columns inspired by the pergola of the ancient basilica of St. Peter's, composed of columns which according to legend came from the temple of Solomon. As a result of the Solomon stories on the ceiling, paid to Ricci and Lanzone, this decoration is similar to the decoration of the church of Santa Susanna in Rome, to be dated after 1598. It may have caught the interest of Vincenzo who, not by chance, in his Discourse above the architecture actually nominates that church. If it is the decorative model used by the Giustinianis on the basis of what we know of the decoration of the nave of Santa Susanna, we also must post-date the fake architecture on the walls of their gallery to the end of the 16th or the early years of the 17th century. Now that the date of birth of Matteo Zaccolini has been firmly established, not 1590 but 1574, it is plausible to believe what Baglione writes regarding the collaboration of the Theatine brotherhood in the architectural-perspective arrangement of the four stories of Santa Susanna painted by Baldassare Croce after 1598.
It is of some importance to notice Vincenzo Giustiniani's interest (he writes of the importance of understanding the laws of perspective) regarding Zoccolini, who was to be the focus of attention not only on the part of Domenichino but also of Cassiano dal Pozzo and Poussin, in other words the protagonists of the Marquis' circle. The Theatine order to which Zoccolini belonged had contacts with the Genoan family. Both in the church of Santa Susanna and in the large but not too large gallery of Palazzo Giustiniani, the use of artists and skilled workers from the work sites of pope Sixtus V gave to the whole an out-moded aura, not in line with the evolution of the times. It is the clever illusionary result of the huge twin columns, placed like wings to the backgrounds, that renews the overall conception and not only by rendering the spatial dimension even greater.
Therefore the decoration of the gallery came in three different phases: the pictures of the story of Solomon in the ceiling paid for on 4 July 1590 possibly at the act of acquiring the palazzo, but in which the Giustinianis had been already living for more than a year; the grotesques with small landscapes in the ceiling to be referred, as says Fioravante Martinelli and as one gathers from the comparison with the repertory of the etchings of the latter, to the huge Tempesta workshop; and finally, immediately afterwards, the decorating of the walls. But above all (this is the point we most want to make) to attribute to Vincenzo (who certainly supervised the works also in the rooms destined to his brother) the decision to decorate the walls, makes clear to us his technical programme. He intended to lay out the collections in two well-distinct "places" consecrated by antiquarian memories: gallery and pinacotheca (the famous three rooms of ancient pictures). And that was how it was to be if, as I have already stated, on Benedetto's death in 1621, the pictures in the gallery numbered no fewer than 39. Vincenzo, his heir, was to drastically reduce the number to only 15. The use evoked in the Discourse above the paintings to "parare compitamente le pareti con quadri" (to fittingly fill the walls with pictures) is therefore not valid for the gallery, arranged so as to house statues. And in point of fact the gallery in palazzo Giustiniani at Bassano Romano entrusted to Albani does have its walls entirely frescoed. The gallery is a space outside time, in which antiquity is intimately revisited and which opts for sculptures, placed on the floor or on large stools. These pieces of furniture, frequently bearing the family crest, were sometimes made by cabinet makers such as Claude Pernet di Lorraine ("two pedestals in walnut one carved in the shape of sirens and the other in the likeness of the god Terminus").
To sum up briefly the layout of the palazzo we can say that until his death the father Giuseppe (1600) lived in the wing towards via Giustiniani, a wing which in 1621 seems to have been available to Benedetto together with all the rooms on the side towards via dei Crescenzi and including the gallery. Vincenzo, until 1621, lived in the so-called "noble second floor", if we like to call it by an expression in use in Genoan palazzi. But he kept for himself the already described three rooms of the noble first floor, irregularly shaped, and situated on the front towards San Luigi dei Francesi.
In the years in which the noble first floor was almost entirely at Benedetto's disposal, apart from the gallery his study also seems to be of particular importance in the itinerary offered to the 17th century visitor. Apart from twelve busts of Roman emperors, Benedetto kept in this room three important fragments of three lost mosaic cycles of the ancient St. Peter's: San Giuseppe (inv. 1621, 160), from the Nativitą of Oratorio of Giovanni VII, Gesł Bambino (inv. 1621, 175), from the tomb of Bonifacio VIII, and the Testa della Madonna (inv. 1621, 159) from the Deesis, which decorated the ancient facade of the Vatican Basilica. The inventory of 1793 still lists them all and regarding the Madonna points out that she has a star on her shoulder, therefore this is a confirmation that it must be the mosaic bought with the other two in Rome from the antiquarian Bonieno da Sevastjanov and now in the Pushkin museum. Also in his study, Benedetto kept the St. Peter and St. Paul which had been part of the fresco of the Sogno di Costantino. In the framework of studies on Christian archaeology, it would seem that his objective was to have a small reliquary of various parts of the ancient basilica, in the years in which he was the provost of Paolo V Borghese (1605-1621) at the Fabbrica di San Pietro. Vincenzo then moved the whole of this group of Christian antiquities into the third room of ancient pictures (1638, II, 236, 237, 238, 239 and 240).
But the palazzo is not a background for the collection. The focus of attention of scholars is verging towards ever more analytical aspects, complementary to artistic history. The archives of the great patrician families provide valuable precision concerning attribution and the dating of key works. One of the reasons for the scholarly attention devoted to the Giustiniani family is the abundance of documents still conserved which invite research of various types. Given the mass of papers examined by us (more than 400 large folders kept in the Archivio di Stato in Rome, as well as numerous other sources and archives) we can claim to know almost everything about the Giustinianis, regarding their life style, furnishings, possessions and, most of all, their collections, the type and composition of which are by now clear to us. Therefore it becomes even more necessary to interpret the data in our possession, to animate the scenario and transform a waxworks museum into a theatre full of living figures, the dimension of which is ever more Italian, despite its numerous intellectual and practical life openings towards a more than European space. On the other hand, we must resist the temptation of the anecdote and the proliferation of historical data in order to dedicate specific attention to the picture collection which is the main objective of our research.
The inventories on the death of Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani, compiled in February 1638 and published by Luigi Salerno in 1960, made it possible to reconstruct the entity and high quality of the whole, almost six hundred paintings and approximately two thousand ancient sculptures. These inventories reveal a great expert and are most useful in refining modern conoisseurship in that they contain, for the picture collection, the names of the artists resulting from the lists presumably dictated according to Vincenzo's own wish when he made a new will on 22 January 1631 (see diagram) and instituted the tie of a trust. The few errors of attribution concern certain old acquisitions by Benedetto the memory of which had been lost and the ancient pictures; the Madonna col Bambino e i santi Giuseppe e Francesco (inv. 1621, 50) by Dosso Dossi in the inventory of 1638, despite the fact that Vincenzo was an expert on Dosso is mentioned as being attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo, but even contemporary scholars have had doubts. Rediscovering, in 1994, the inventories of the elder brother, Cardinal Benedetto, the first being published between approximately 1600 and 1611 (108 paintings) and the second dated 1621 (300 paintings), and comparing them with those of the younger brother, it has been possible for me to track down the first nucleus and retrace numerous paintings which had been dispersed.